The Leader of NASA’s Artemis II Mission Is Still Moonstruck

Last month, for the first time in more than fifty years, four astronauts flew to the moon and back. Their mission, Artemis II, was a test run for future endeavors, including the construction of a NASA base on the lunar surface. Reid Wiseman, a former U.S. Naval aviator who served as the mission’s commander, told me that the journey made him think about the Apollo astronauts of the nineteen-sixties. “I wonder if they were a little bit scared, because I’m a little bit scared,” he remembered thinking. “I bet they were.” NASA’s most powerful rocket hurled them more than a quarter-million miles into space—farther than anyone has travelled from Earth—and Earth’s gravity brought them home.

Wiseman and I met at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas. At fifty years old, he was fit and disarmingly earnest, wearing a blue astronaut jumpsuit over a pair of leather cowboy boots. He earned his NASA astronaut wings in 2src11, before completing a six-month mission on the International Space Station. In 2src2src, his wife, Carroll, a nurse, died of cancer. He spent two years as the nation’s chief astronaut, an earthbound role that allowed him to raise two teen-age daughters. Then, in 2src23, NASA chose him to command Artemis II. He would work alongside a pilot, Victor Glover, and two mission specialists, Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Wiseman, his fellow crew members, and their NASA colleagues essentially had to write their own how-to manual for twenty-first-century lunar missions. But they sometimes wondered if they would ever have a chance to use it. In the nineteen-nineties and the two-thousands, NASA’s plans to return to the moon were cancelled owing to anemic budgets. “We weren’t a hundred-per-cent sure if the nation was going to remain committed,” he told me. “We spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C.” I asked him when he realized that the mission was a go. “When the solid-rocket motors lit,” he told me. “That was when we knew we were going to the moon.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the moment you were selected for Artemis II. It sounds like it was as much a sobering moment as it was a joyful one.

It was also an embarrassing moment. My crew and I didn’t know that’s what was coming. We had all these meetings on our calendar. I just completely ignored this meeting with the chief astronaut because I thought it was about something totally different. I was downtown at a medical appointment. My boss at the time sends me a text: “Hey, I really think you should be in this meeting right now. We’re twenty minutes into it, and we miss you.” I tied in through Microsoft Teams. I just saw my bosses sitting there. I saw Victor and Christina sitting there. It turned out that they were both late as well.

You don’t feel like you won the Lotto. You don’t feel like jumping for joy. You just feel, like, Whoa, this is going to be a lot of work. This is going to be a very intense situation.

What did your selection mean for you as a single father? How did your daughters receive the news?

Before the formal announcement came out, we had about two weeks where we knew. I had talked to my kids about what I would be willing to do as an astronaut. I would only go back to the space station when they were in college. And if there was an opportunity to do an Artemis mission—we call them short durations, although it certainly didn’t feel like a short duration—I would be interested.

No kid wants their only parent to go do that. I felt a bit selfish. I also felt like this was a crew, and a mission, that would really be rewarding in the end. I talked to my kids about it: “This is something I would like to do, and I know it is going to be difficult for you.” The next day, my older daughter made moon cupcakes, and my younger daughter was all on board. She kept checking FamousBirthdays.com. She’s, like, “Dad, you went from No. 8src,srcsrcsrc to No. 5src,srcsrcsrc on Famous Birthdays.” She was happy with that. [Wiseman has now surpassed No. 6,5srcsrc on Famous Birthdays.]

Later, on the seventh day of the mission, I did a video chat with both of them. That was the day where I could tell, in the way they were looking at me and talking to me, that they understood why I’d said yes three years earlier. They understood the weight of this mission.

Help me understand how you fit training into the rest of your life. Is it, like, twelve hours of emergency scenarios—and then you’re helping your kids with their math homework?

That sounds about right. About a year prior to launch—April of 2src25—we started to quiet down our lives. We stopped a lot of the public appearances. Even if friends were going and doing something, with very small exceptions, I started saying no. At the Johnson Space Center, we were working about eight hours a day. It was a fairly respectful schedule. We usually had Saturday and Sunday off, although as we geared up toward the mission, we were generally working voluntarily on Sundays. One daughter is in college, one daughter is in high school. I was very open with them: If you need help, it’s going to have to come from tutors, teachers, friends. It’s just not going to come from home.

In some ways, they are so much further along now than they would have been if I were there, nurturing them through this. A little of that makes me feel guilty that I wasn’t there. I could not have done this if they were six and eight. For many years, I didn’t fly in space because I was an only parent. It just was not an option for me. I think, in the end, they gave a lot of themselves to this mission. I’m very proud of them for doing that.

Your first mission, in 2src14, took you to the International Space Station for almost six months. How does that compare with Artemis?

It was totally different. The International Space Station has been up there now for twenty-six years. We know how to fly to the space station. The training is very regimented. There was a lot of novel science, but there was very little novel learning on how to operate that machine. On Artemis II, everything was new. We didn’t know how to live and work. We didn’t know how to operate as four people. Sometimes, it was the crew unravelling those mysteries, going, “Hey, that worked when we had six months in space, but that isn’t going to work when we have ten days.” We had to unlearn some things.

When you’re flying to the moon, is there space for your mind to drift?

I remember my mind drifting for the first time on the eighth day of flight. We were getting close to home, and I started thinking about seeing my kids. I immediately had to stop that and say, “Nope, you do not have space for that in your brain.” The first five days—I wish Victor, Christina, and Jeremy were sitting right here, they would all agree—we were waking up and working until bed. And we were usually getting to bed about an hour later than we had hoped.

When you’re in that tiny spacecraft with four people, you’re all over each other. I feel like I’m close to you right now, but three weeks ago, I would have asked why we’re so far away. Everything that is easy becomes hard. Just making lunch: How do four people all make their food? If one person is exercising, nothing else can happen in the cabin. All that stuff was taking far, far longer than we had anticipated. We got much better as we went.

You mentioned putting Earth aside and focussing on the mission, but what does that mean when you’re on such a novel and extraordinary voyage?

Daydreaming is important. It’s important to be bored as a human. But, sometimes, you’ve got to remain caged. Instead of thinking about being home, hugging my kids, it would have been a lot better for me to think about, What’s breakfast tomorrow? Or: What are my crewmates doing and how can I help them? Maintaining an appropriate level of engagement with the spacecraft, with the control team, and with your crewmates. You never know what that spacecraft is going to throw at you.

We had a full-on fire emergency on our next-to-last day in space. It was a false alarm, but that stopped everything: all the electrical power, all the ventilation. We were just sitting there with an emergency tone going off with a completely stagnant spacecraft—no airflow, and it was heating up. You’re human, so there are moments of terror. We had quite a few orbital-trajectory-correction burns. Before each of them, save two, we had some sort of alarm go off, and I could feel my heart rate elevating. I could feel my adrenaline picking up. As long as you understand these emotions, I think they help you perform. Those bring you up to your A game. You see it in professional athletes.

What we do in the astronaut office is, I would almost say, scaring ourselves. We fly airplanes, we fly helicopters, we mountain-climb, we dive to the bottom of the ocean, we live underwater. All those things just get you much more comfortable being uncomfortable. When we had that fire emergency—which is the only emergency we ever had—everybody went straight to their jobs. We started knocking out all the procedures to make sure the vehicle was safe, and we were safe. It’s pretty cool to see that. Nobody was distracted. Everybody did exactly what we had trained to do.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, we all noticed how close and comfortable the crew seemed. What surprised you about the team?

We were not always friends. We were not always aligned. But those differences actually helped us out. We have a team of operational psychologists here at the Johnson Space Center. They’re usually just there if we need them, but we flipped that paradigm on its head. Almost every other week, we would have a four-hour session with them. They would go through team-building exercises. What is going on in your own brain? Where are you? How are you showing up for your crew? Those were some of the most difficult conversations I’ve had. Usually, I’d have to leave and go for a walk because they’re so exhausting. But, by the end, we knew each other. We knew what made us happy, we knew what made us upset, and we could show up for each other.

We hired a poet to teach us poetry. We hired spiritual and cultural leaders to talk about the significance of the moon around the world. We wanted to know how everyone sees the moon. We all look up at that moon every single night, so what does it mean? What does it mean to somebody who’s in Ghana, or Spain, or Australia? We wanted to feel those things when we were out there. It’s the thing I’m most proud of in this group—we did a tremendous amount of investment in each other.

Tell me about the view.

For a lot of our mission, it was greasy smudges, because our foreheads and hands were all over those windows at all times. In one of my favorite moments, we were waking up to do lunar flyby, and I called down to Mission Control and said, “How do I clean grease off the windows?’’ It made me so happy, because it meant that we were using them.

One thing that really did surprise me was how quickly Earth gets small out the window. From about the second day on, we dubbed it Tiny Earth, and it was getting smaller every day. When we were out by the moon, the Earth was, like, the size of a quarter—a tiny, super-bright crescent of an Earth.

The moon is gravitationally locked with planet Earth. For as long as humans have existed, we have only seen one side. But, very early in the mission, we could start to see craters on the far side. The first time we put a zoom lens on the moon, we were able to see features we had trained for. Orientale. Ohm crater. We start to see them in these images and we’re, like, “Oh my gosh, we are seeing the far side of the moon and we’re still two days away.” The day we did lunar flyby, we woke up twenty thousand miles from the moon. I took off the window shade and I was frozen. I mean, frozen—to the point where Christina finally was, like, “Hey, you going to finish your checklist for the morning activities?” I could not peel myself away. There’s this whole moon, it’s sitting out there, and it looks different than the moon on Earth. I highly recommend it.

When the capsule passed behind the moon, it lost contact with Earth for about forty minutes. Can you describe that?

I really want it to be this grandiose stretch of time, but I will be completely honest. We were right back into the science, and we were doing exactly what we had trained for. We watched “Earthset.” I was able to stick my iPhone up into this docking-hatch window and take a video of Earth setting behind the moon. Jeremy had a bunch of maple cookies. I was free-floating. I cut the bags of cookies open and all four of us just stopped for a second.

Then Victor and Christina had a bunch of observations to do, because we’re seeing parts of the moon that have never been seen by human eyes. They were not seen in Apollo due to lighting. They’ve been seen by satellite, but never by humans. That was the most intense scientific part of that journey for us. We were totally out of touch with Earth.

I just wanted to see the distance to Earth get smaller. It kept growing, past where the flight-dynamics officers had said our maximum distance from Earth would be. We went two miles farther than that. I was just thinking, We’re a pretty small spacecraft. I wonder if two miles is going to be significant or not? Maybe we missed it by a little bit, and we’re going to be stuck out here for a while.

Then I saw that number just tick back down. 219,669 was the max, in nautical miles. Then I saw 219,668. I told the crew, “We’re on our way home.” They cheered a little bit.

Then you get Earthrise. First, you just saw these two little points coming up from behind the moon. That was Earth’s atmosphere. Then you could see the crescent Earth start to come. You could see these mountains of the moon with the Earth behind it. It was truly magnificent, because there is no atmosphere on the moon, so it’s crystal clear.

Then the Earth was back. We looked down at our displays, and we could see the Canberra radio site, so we knew we had a view of Australia. We called down to Mission Control, and we were back in contact. That’s just a great feeling. We got ready for the solar eclipse, and that blew us all away.

Few people have ever experienced such existential isolation. That must surely give one pause.

I really like the way Jeremy Hansen says it. In that moment, you’re in the middle of the universe. You can feel the stars around you. It’s very three-dimensional. The moon is three-dimensional. He basically said, “I felt unbelievably small, to the point of infinitesimally small. Yet, at the same time, it was the deepest sense of power that I had on the whole mission. It wasn’t individual power. It was power that this whole planet of people had the courage to send us out there.” I can’t say it any better myself.

How has your experience changed your perceptions of the Apollo astronauts and what they did?

I really felt disbelief that Apollo 8 had the courage to leave low-Earth orbit for the first time. They went all the way to the moon in that Apollo spacecraft. I just thought about them. I’m, like, I wonder if they were a little bit scared, because I’m a little bit scared. I bet they were a little bit scared. They’d never admit it. I won’t admit it—although I just did—but I bet they were a little bit scared. That was a crazy thing that they did.

During Artemis II, you made history by having problems with Microsoft Outlook farther from Earth than any human being before. How do you handle that kind of legacy?

Product placement was very important for us in this mission. (I’m totally joking.) I actually found out I had three Microsoft Outlooks, and one of them was working. But the two that were linked on the desktop, which was what I was supposed to open, from our training—neither one of those worked. I really didn’t want to become a meme on this mission. But if that is the thing that made people laugh, then we were highly successful.

What does it mean to be an astronaut today?

Wow. The whole world is with you, and watching you, and they want to go do great things. If we are going to go to the moon, and we’re going to go on to Mars, we aren’t going to do that as the United States of America. We are going to do that as planet Earth. You need everyone with you.

Was there a moment after returning home when it hit you—the immensity of what you and the Artemis crew had done?

We are going to work on that for a long time. Let me just explain a few honest things. When we come back, we are busy. There’s a lot of science. There’s a lot of reconditioning. After about ten days home, I told NASA, “I need tomorrow off. I’m not working on Friday.” I went down to Galveston Beach. I sat on the beach for about four hours. I intentionally took no phone. I took nothing with me—just a chair and an umbrella. I just sat there. I was allowing myself something I very rarely do: to be proud for a minute. To sit back and go, “Man, we just did this.”

Sometimes it is hard to allow yourself to do that because . . . I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s cultural, or if it’s because you work at NASA. You don’t ever want to take ownership. But we need to. We need to be proud of what we just accomplished, because it was a really special thing.

The Earth you left, and the Earth you found when you got back, are two very different places. Your face is on magazines now. People think about your life and what you’ve done as a way to make sense of their own lives. How do you integrate your old self with this new reality?

Sometimes you yearn for the old self. My crew, we’ve done this together, for sure. Myself, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy. I was talking to Victor at the airport on Friday, leaving Montreal. We ended up talking for about three hours. We cried a couple of times—not out of sadness, out of joy. We had the hair on our arms standing up as we were talking.

I told him, “I think we slipped through the hands of God during that mission.” That just stopped him in his tracks. He completely agreed. There’s just ways that we see the world right now that are totally different. It is hard to come back and have all the attention. We want to share everything. Everybody wants to hear about this journey. That is exhausting. It takes a lot of commitment to continue to get out there and talk, when sometimes all you want to do is sit on your couch and decompress. People just want to see you, they want to hear you, they want to communicate with you. They want to give you a gift. I was woefully unprepared for that.

I was just listening to the birds this morning. I walked into work, and there was humidity everywhere down the hallway because the air-conditioner hadn’t turned on, and I was, like, “This is amazing. Look at all this humidity. I love all this.” There’s a richness to being back to planet Earth.

How do you recalibrate your professional drive after doing something so epic?

I love that question. I do what I’ve been doing for the last decade. My brother’s a great mentor. I really want to talk to him about this. I read books. I just finished “What to Make of a Life” [by Jim Collins]. It just came out. About two-thirds of the way through that book, he was talking about how you maintain the fire after you’ve done something incredible.

I’m as motivated as I have been in probably twenty years. It’s incredible just how excited I am to get to start writing the next chapter after coming back from the moon. I did not expect that. I expected to come back and be very comfortable being bored, being patient. But I really feel energized.

Do you spend the rest of your life trying to go back? Do you retire and become a painter?

This is a fundamental question. It’s hard to understand what is enough. I don’t need any more things in my life. I really value my family. I want to commit to them in ways that I haven’t been able to commit to them before. Then, if I can help us get back to the moon . . . I don’t need to go back. But I would love to.

I’ve talked to my crew about this, too, and I think they agree. I will find more joy in watching new astronauts go experience what we just experienced than I would going back again, and taking that from someone else. I think that wouldn’t feel good to me. It will feel great to watch my friends go do these sorts of things. To watch humanity expand a little bit.

A crater seen during the mission has been named after your late wife, Carroll. How did your family respond to that?

My kids did not know that was coming. Even I didn’t know that was coming until two days before liftoff. Christina Koch had the idea. She talked to the science team. They found a few eligible craters and we looked through them as a crew. Then, on the second or third day of the mission, we could look out and see that crater. It was so bright. It’s on the near side–far side boundary. We just thought that was exactly the right thing to do.

My two kids had come into Mission Control earlier that morning. I didn’t even know they were coming in. I’d asked the flight-control team, “Hey, if my kids show up, let me know. And if my kids don’t show up, just lie to me and tell me they’re there.” They had come into the Mission Control viewing room when we broke the distance record from Apollo 13. That was a moment that didn’t mean that much to me. We were just flying our mission—it was just a number passing. But it meant a lot to them. They came in to watch their dad do something. Now it’s going to mean something to me.

Jeremy Hansen was giving a little talk about us breaking the Apollo 13 distance record. I just looked over at him, like, “I think now is the right time. We can see Carroll Crater right out the window.” Jeremy just went right into that speech. My goodness. All four of us were in tears and hugging it out. That was the moment that I think our crew was forever bonded. ♦